INSIDE TECHNOLOGY.

Aging Boomers may be bonanza

As the infirmities of age catch up with Baby Boomers, interest in health-care technology is bound to rise. And Intel Corp. senses an opportunity.

If re-engineered and repackaged, much available technology could be harnessed to improve the lives of the aged and the infirm, contends Eric Dishman, Intel's manager of proactive health research.

Getting useful products into the market "is as much an imagination problem as one of inventing new technology," Dishman says.

To promote and focus the necessary imagination, Intel has partnered with the Chicago-based Alzheimer's Association to establish a consortium called Everyday Technologies for Alzheimer Care.

Funded by Intel and, it hopes, by other firms that will join the consortium, ETAC will provide research grants to start-up firms and universities doing research on new products to help people with Alzheimer's disease.

One product for people with fairly mild memory loss could use facial recognition technology, said William Thies, a vice president for the Alzheimer's Association.

"A person might wear a lapel pin with an embedded camera that would scan the faces of whoever he meets," said Thies.

"If it recognized someone whose face was in its database, it could communicate with the person through an earbud, giving the name and relationship," he said.

Using motion detectors and other off-the-shelf technology, Intel researchers are constructing environments that can gather information about people in the home.

"The pressure sensors can tell if a person is sitting in his favorite chair or tell if someone spends a lot of time just standing in front of the stove," said Dishman.

"It can provide clues such as whether someone has trouble remembering how to operate the stove," he said.

Those clues could trigger devices to provide needed reminders. Researchers are also experimenting with how a computer-driven system could best communicate with an older person--whether, for example, it would be comforting or disconcerting to have an alarm clock remind them to take their medications.

By testing such technology first in the lab and later in homes of people with cognitive disfunction, Intel hopes to learn what technologies are truly helpful, said Dishman.

But it also hopes that others will do similar research to move the entire field ahead.

Intel doesn't plan to commercialize the technology itself, but only to assist in the process with the expectation that it will lead to greater use of the computer chips it produces, Dishman said.

Thies said by working with Intel and other firms the Alzheimer's Association hopes to awaken large businesses to the new market opportunities in health-care products.

When he worked with the American Heart Association, Thies said, a similar effort helped promote the widespread availability of defibrillators.

Argonne machine fights SARS: A key enzyme from the virus that causes SARS has been identified and its structure mapped in a move that could help researchers find ways to prevent or treat the sometimes deadly disease.

The work was announced this week by Structural GenomiX Inc., based in San Diego. Shortly after identifying the enzyme's structure, SGX put the information into a public health database so it can be freely accessed by research scientists.

SGX scientists who identified the enzyme's three-dimensional structure used the powerful X-ray center called the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory to make the discovery.